Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Catching up on some overdue posts… I interviewed Fred Brooks, a pioneering software thinker (and doer), for Computerworld.

Brooks may be old school, but his new book, The Design of Design, offers well-polished, concise essays that even the most egregious multitasker will be able to follow. We talked about some of his ideas in the Q&A, but there’s almost always good stuff that doesn’t make it. The last thing to go in this one were his comments about the state of writing amongst American-born graduate students in computer science:

We still get graduate students who have difficulty writing plain English paragraphs. I get some students with English as a second language who write better than some of my American students.

Writing something other than code still matters for programmers.

The Nieman class of 2011 (sans one, who was navigating treacherous visa waters).

We are a diverse group geographically, of course, and also professionally. Newspapers employ 15 of us, television five of us, radio one, two of us work in multiple media, one of us mostly writes books, and one of us is a photojournalist. Eight of us are freelance or independent.

I haven’t posted in more than a month. I spent all that time selling a house in the exurbs and moving to an apartment in Cambridge. Economists grouse that people aren’t willing to move to where jobs are, but they discount the sheer human cost moving extracts from us. Between working and moving, I have had no time and less energy to do anything like post even a small item here on this blog.
The sale underscores why housing sales matter so much to the economy: for almost everyone, a house represents the  most expensive thing we’ll ever buy or sell. Both buyer and seller write a lot of checks; as sellers, we spent thousands of dollars on landscaping, handyman services and painting, all to make the place look the best it could in a tough market (and it did look good).  We also spent hundreds more on things like lawyer fees, various taxes and fees for things like changing our auto registration, our licenses, proving that our septic tank was still up to snuff (and getting it cleaned out). The excise tax at the end of the process was a couple of grand.  The realtors, of course, split five percent of the sale price, a healthy fee even in the current economy, and our broker paid for advertising and other services as part of the selling process.

The buyers have to write lots of checks, too. Both of us will have to move, paying for moving boxes, movers and in our case storage for things we didn’t bring, but don’t want to have to pay to replace when we move to someplace bigger than our apartment. We paid for paint for the apartment (never mind why) and also asked for, and got, the washer and dryer replaced (why the previous tenants had tolerated a washer with a broken drum is beyond me). There are always unexpected expenses, too — somehow, my blue suit did not make the move.  I’ll have to replace that; a man can’t be without a blue suit. Home sales touch wide swaths of the economy.
I’ll try to post more regularly again. I started my Nieman Fellowship today, and a year at Harvard may prove equally as time-consuming (I’m already doing homework and the school year hasn’t started yet). I met my fellow Fellows today, and am humbled to be among their number. What an incredible group of journalists!